Data Domain Unveils Bigger, Faster Dedupe Storage Appliance

Storage vendor Data Domain this week unveiled its new DD880 enterprise-class dedupe appliance in what will probably be its last new product introduction before it is acquired by EMC.

EMC on Monday said it had acquired a majority ownership in Data Domain after winning a prolonged bidding war for the company with storage archrival NetApp.

Data Domain's new DD880 is the fastest backup array on a per-controller basis regardless of whether data deduplication is factored in or not, said Shane Jackson, senior director of product and channel marketing for the vendor.

Deduplication, also called "dedupe," removes duplicate information as data is stored, backed up or archived, resulting in a significant decrease in storage capacity requirements.

Data Domain features inline dedupe, which uses a separate appliance between the data source and the data target to dedupe the data as it is moved.

The DD880 offers an aggregate bandwidth of 5.4 Tbytes per hour, or 1.28 Tbytes per hour for a single stream thanks to its new quad-socket Intel processors, Jackson said. That is about twice the performance of its existing DD690, he said.

"We talk about our performance with dedupe turned on," he said. "Other vendors may or may not turn dedupe on when talking performance."

Also new with the DD880 is the ability to replicate from up to 180 remote sites into a single central location, doubling the DD690's 90-to1 replication capability, Jackson said.

Ed Reidenbach, senior director of product management at Data Domain, said the new Intel processors also offer a faster data ingest rate than any other system on the market.

As a result, a single DD880 offers just under the performance of two DD690s, Reidenbach said.

Data Domain has also revamped its graphical user interface (GUI) with the introduction of the DD880.

"Typically in the past, people preferred the command line," Reidenbach said. "But as asynchronous replication gets more powerful, and users have more [data] objects to manage, they want a more graphical interface."

The new performance of the DD880 will be welcomed by customers, said Keith Norbie, vice president of sales at Nexus Information Systems, a Minnetonka, Minn.-based solution provider and Data Domain partner.

"It's fast, and it's big," Norbie said. "That will help in penetrating new accounts. And for existing accounts, it's easier to grow them by selling fewer DD880s than the DD690s."

The risk to the channel is the fact that the DD880 will appeal to larger accounts that vendors sometimes take direct, or accounts that specifically ask to work direct with vendors, Norbie said.

"The only way to mitigate it is account activity," he said. "You need to maintain constant contacts with your accounts, and maintain a good relationship with your vendor reps."

The DD880 might take some share in the compliance storage array market from products such as EMC's Centerra, and could eat away at the primary storage market as well, Norbie said.

"With the DD880 having self-healing capabilities and replication combined with high-performance backup and archiving, it could shift business away from primary storage arrays," he said.

The DD880 is scheduled to ship in the third quarter.

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